The greatest banker and financier in America at the present day is undoubtedly J. Pierpont Morgan, who, however, is known not so well for the millions he has accumulated as for the other millions he has spent in collecting rare objects of art, until he has become the possessor of a collection surpassing any ever possessed by another private individual. That much of this will one day be bequeathed by its owner to the public there can be little doubt.
J. Pierpont Morgan is of a family of bankers. His father, Junius Spencer Morgan, was for many years a partner in the great London banking house of George Peabody & Co., and on the retirement of Mr. Peabody, succeeded him as the head of the business. There was never any doubt of the son's vocation. Born in 1837, and carefully educated, he entered the banking house of Duncan, Sherman & Co. at the age of twenty, and from that time, rose steadily, until he became the head of the greatest banking house in the country. He has been largely concerned in the reorganization of railways and the consolidation of industrial properties, and the magnitude of some of his operations is fairly astounding. During the Cleveland administration, he floated a national bond issue of $62,000,000; he marketed the securities of the United States Steel Corporation, with a capitalization of $1,100,000,000; he secured American subscriptions aggregating $50,000,000 for the British war loan of 1901; he controls over fifty thousand miles of railway, and his interests extend into practically every great financial enterprise in America. He has given large sums of money for public enterprises in New York City, among them a million and a half for a great lying-in hospital. He built the "Columbia," which twice defeated the "Shamrock" in the races for the America's cup, and he has made many valuable gifts to the various museums and libraries of New York City. The power he wields is enormous, but he wields it wisely and legitimately, winning the respect, as well as the admiration of men.
The greatest work of American men of affairs during the past half century has been the upbuilding and extension of the railroad system of the country. The railroad mileage of the United States at the present time is over three hundred and twenty-five thousand; the total cost of the railroad equipment of the country reaches fourteen billion dollars and the yearly earnings average over two and a half billions. They employ over a million and a half men, whose wages average three million dollars a day—and, it may be added, they kill or injure nearly ninety thousand. But that is a detail. With this vast development of the railroad business the names of some half dozen men are so closely connected that the great systems of the country are generally known as the Hill lines, the Harriman lines, the Vanderbilt lines, the Gould lines, and so on. Of these men we shall try to tell something briefly here.
We have already related how Cornelius Vanderbilt secured control of the New York Central and Hudson River roads, and added to these until he had secured an entrance into Chicago; and how his son, William Henry Vanderbilt, added to this system until it became, and still remains, one of the strongest in the country. We have told, too, of Jay Gould's ideas of railroad management, which seem to have been to get the most out of it for Jay Gould. But when Jay Gould died, he was caught, as it were, with thousands of miles of railroads on his hands. He left four sons, George Gould, Edwin Gould, Howard Gould and Frank Gould, of whom George is the only one that really counts. But he, with a real genius for railroad building, has developed the Gould lines into a great system stretching from Buffalo and Pittsburgh southwestward to Chicago, Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, Ogden, St. Louis, New Orleans, Galveston and away out to El Paso. These lines have played a most important part in the development of the great Southwest, and it is said that George Gould is already blazing a way to the Atlantic seaboard, as an outlet for the mighty freight traffic which his lines control.
No man connected with railroad building in this country has had a more interesting or adventurous career than James J. Hill. Born on a little Canadian farm in 1838, descended from the hardy Scotch-Irish of whom we have spoken so often, his father died when he was fifteen years, and he was left to his own resources. He found work as a wood-chopper, and one day, while he was chopping down a tree a traveler stopped at the house to take dinner, hitching his horse to the gate. The boy noticed that it was tired and fagged and carried it a bucket of water. This attention pleased the traveler, and as he drove away, tossed the boy a Minnesota newspaper, remarking, "Go out there, young man. That country needs youngsters of your spirit."
The boy read the paper with its glowing accounts of the new country, and the next morning, walking to the tree he had been cutting he hit it one last lick for luck, and announced, "I've chopped my last tree." That tree, it is said, bears to-day a great placard with the words, "The last tree chopped by James J. Hill." It was the last one, for a day or two later the boy started for St. Paul. He brought with him to the United States the lusty body, frugal instincts and good principles of his Scotch-Irish ancestry, and, in addition to those, a self-confidence and sureness of judgment destined to take him far.
He got employment as a shipping clerk in a steamboat office in St. Paul, and so took his first lessons in transportation problems. Pretty soon he was agent for a steamboat line, then he established a fuel and transportation business on his own account and managed it so well that by 1873, he had accumulated a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars. There was in Minnesota at the time a little railroad called the St. Paul & Pacific. It started at St. Paul, but it stopped after it had got only a few hundred miles toward the Pacific. Hill decided to buy it. The price was half a million, so he tramped back to Canada and persuaded the bank of Montreal to let him have the $400,000 he needed. That was surely one of the most wonderful feats of a wonderful career. The directors of the bank were severely criticised; men laughed at his purchase, pointing out that the road had never paid, and prophesying that it never would pay.
Yet that Jim Crow road was the foundation of the Great Northern system, the Hill line, stretching across Dakota and Montana to Puget Sound. Every man who went into the enterprise with Hill now owns his stock in it as a free gift, for in the intervening years, the cost has been returned to him in the shape of dividends and bonuses. It has never failed to pay regular dividends, and has, perhaps, won public confidence more surely than any other in the country. For James J. Hill has kept faith in the smallest detail with every man who ever entrusted a dollar to his hands. The loyalty of the employes of the Great Northern has passed into a proverb, "Once a Hill man, always a Hill man," and it is true. He knows his road as few other men do. Before he bought the St. Paul & Pacific, he traveled over the route in an ox-cart, studying not only the road, but the people along the way—there weren't many—and the resources of the country. Before he extended his line to the Pacific, he went the whole distance on foot and horseback.